The CenterStage Project today released CenterStage 0.5. "We are happy to announce CenterStage 0.5. The next development version of the Mac Media Center. There is a bunch of new features. We are very excited about this release since it gives skin developers as well as module developers a much better base to work from. And we have already started to see some third party skins and modules in the works. We are planning to add sections on the site for skins and modules in the near future," notes Conny of the CenterStage project.

New features in this release include: a new Photo module (with inline slideshow); a Music module; module transitions (Quartz Composer-based); on-screen display; zoom in full screen playback; resolution switching in the preferences; and more.

Music is ridiculously slow. I thought it might take a while to import your music the first time. I restarted the Mac mini, relaunched CenterStage, and it took just as long. I hope Apple releases a stable version of Front Row soon. IMO, this app has a long way to go.

Scroll down to the first comment. I am in full agreement with this proposed technology too.

PS:

Quote:

Minimum System Requirements
Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)

Great, now I have the choice between an even crummier Finder* with its caponised Spotlight-based search that doesn't actually search all my files, or downloading the source and back-porting this to Panther.

Or, maybe, cancelling the download and doing something more useful like playing solitaire. With real cards.

Actually, since iTunes implements the OS X GUI itself instead of using the standard libraries (presumably so they can do the right thing on Windows as well) it's got a lot of brokenness in common with skinnable apps, including not following changes in the OS theme...

(themes are not like skins, they change the whole user interface consistently and have to behave compatibly with the standard UI for standard apps to work, so they don't have the "don't work right" problems that skinnable apps do)